Once you factor in the uniforms, the textbooks and two-week historical tours to Egypt and Turkey ("A cruise along the River Nile will allow students to fully appreciate the rich culture"), you're talking at least $160,000 - after tax.

While recognising the benefits of a good education, it's nonetheless instructional to point out what else $160,000 could buy you, namely:

A one-bedroom apartment in Rua Visconde de Piraja, in Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro;

Sixty-six cases of Henschke's 2004 Hill of Roses Shiraz;

Neuro cryopreservation - freezing of the head and brain - for you and a loved one at Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona.

GET SERIOUS

Maybe the examples are outlandish but they underline the fact that you can do an awful lot with money like that. For instance, you could do a house extension or buy an investment property. Or, if you are like Jane Caro, buy a farm.

The former advertising executive and long-time advocate of public education, Caro lives with her husband in Artarmon, on Sydney's lower north shore, where elite private schools are thick on the ground.

But when it came to educating their daughters, Charlotte, now 20, and Polly, 22, Caro and her husband went public, sending the girls to Mosman High School.

"From kindy to year 12, we reckon we saved about $300,000," Caro says. "The girls got a fantastic education and we were free to use that money in other ways. We took them overseas - twice - we bought good computer technology, we got them great coaching when they needed it and we are now paying their HECS fees."

From kindie to year 12, we reckon we saved about $300,000 - Jane Caro, parent.

Most importantly, the money allowed Caro to buy an 87-hectare property in the Upper Allyn, near Dungog.

"The farm had no TV, no computers, no electronic devices," she says. "Just horses, cows, a river and the one rule that the kids were not to be bored."

As the girls grew older, the farm became not only a family refuge and place to take friends but the ultimate extracurricular teaching aid.

"We collected berries, cooked, grew trees, watched birds," Caro says. "We just did really good stuff that I thought was more valuable than spending $50,000 a year on sandstone gates and what someone once told me was 'a nicer class of kiddie'."

EDUCATIONAL ADVANTAGE

Conventional wisdom holds that there is nothing as valuable as a good education - read "private schooling" - and that parents should do whatever it takes to secure one for their children.

But what if conventional wisdom was, well, wrong? What if you concluded, like Caro and her family, that spending $300,000 on fancy uniforms and "sandstone gates" simply wasn't worth it?

"Rich people will send their kids to private school because the fees are immaterial to them," the principal research fellow at the Australian Council for Education Research, Gary Marks, says. "So the issue of whether it's really worth spending that money is more salient for middle- and lower-income families."

Marks' research indicates that private schooling does account for slightly better outcomes: private school students score an average 7.5 points higher out of 100 on the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank, when adjusted for socio-economic background.

"It's difficult to say why that is," Marks says. "Perhaps it because there is more pressure on the kids to perform academically at a private school, or there is better teaching or maybe it's because private schools have more choices about who their students are."

But as Marks makes clear, that 7.5 extra ATAR points is a statistic, not a guarantee. "It doesn't mean your child is necessarily going to score higher."

PRIVATE TUTORS

Marks also points out that money spent on private education might just as profitably be put towards something else, whether it be private tutors, intensive music lessons ("so your kid can get a music scholarship to a private school"), or buying property in an area where the public schools are known to be good.

"This is certainly popular in Melbourne," Hewison Private Wealth financial planner Chris Morcom says. "Lots of people try to buy in the catchment around Balwyn High School, in the eastern suburbs, because it's a pretty well-regarded public school."

The property option is attractive because it has a lifestyle element - who wouldn't fancy a nice little pied-a-terre in another suburb? - not to mention clear financial advantages; if you live in the property, for example, you won't pay capital gains tax.

And even though the "good" suburbs attract a premium, Morcom says that "because property prices at least keep track with inflation over the medium- to long-term, it's going to be a good investment".

Or you might consider buying an investment property.

"You could borrow against your house and buy a two-bedroom apartment worth $380,000 in the Melbourne CBD," Morcom says. "Even getting a conservative 3 per cent rental return and 3 per cent capital growth, the property would be worth $453,000 at the end of six years, of which you would have $420,000 equity.

"You could then hand the apartment over to the kids and give them a foot up into the property market."

HOLIDAY ADVENTURE

Morcom also suggests investing the $380,000 in a share portfolio, which, taking into account dividends, franking credits and capital growth, would also be worth about $450,000 after six years, of which you would have $411,095 net equity.

"The only difference is that it might be harder getting a loan for the shares, because most banks are happier to lend against property." But what if you just want to have fun?

What if you are sick of the grind, the endless treadmill that defines much of our working lives? For the $40,000-plus it costs to have two teenagers at private school for a year, the whole family could go on a month-long holiday to Europe.

When Caro's daughters were nine and 12 the whole family flew to Britain, where they drove around for three weeks. Seven years later they went again, this time travelling through Italy, France and Ireland.

"It was great for the kids to see the history and culture and experience different languages and ways of life," Caro says. "It broadened their horizons and showed them different ways of doing things."

Each trip cost tens of thousands of dollars. "But I still consider it worthwhile," she says. "Those trips were much better value than private-school fees. More fun, too."

Tutoring and coaching colleges

You don't have to flog your children like a "Chinese tiger mum" to get the best results: here are some alternative strategies.

Tutoring is one-on-one help that can be remedial or supplementary to mainstream education; coaching is usually in classes and has a specific goal, whether it be admission into a selective school or passing an exam.

"Clients see it as an investment," the chief executive officer of the Australian Tutoring Association, Mohan Dhall, says.

"They often use it to try to get their kids on scholarships to private schools or to universities."

Tutoring costs between $20 an hour (for an untrained university student who is studying in the field) and $110 an hour (for a highly trained expert or published author).

Coaching colleges charge between $380 and $450 a term for eight weeks in a class of 25 to 30 students. Dhall recommends visiting the ATA website (ata.edu.au) for a list of accredited members.

Des Sloane: critical edge

"You only get one shot at educating your kids," Des Sloane says. "So you better get it right."

Together with his barrister wife, Sylvie, the 46-year-old former police detective sent both his boys, Vale, now 19, and Heath, 16, to The King's School, Sydney. But it hasn't been easy. Not being an "old boy" (Sloane went to a public school), there was no guarantee of a place for his sons. "When they did get in we were living in the Blue Mountains and so we immediately put our house on the market. For the two years it took to sell, we drove them every day to and from the Blue Mountains to Parramatta and on Saturdays for sport."

When the house sold, they bought a property two streets behind The King's School, "so the boys could make the most of the opportunity".

The Sloanes took a line-of-credit for the $300,000 that they will have paid by the time their second son Heath graduates in 2012. "And that's not counting the $320 jackets and $3500 study trips to Borneo," Sloane says.

"But it's worth it. It's a more complete education, an education with purpose. When you graduate from King's you don't just graduate as a student but as a Kingsman, a servant leader, someone with a sense of belonging."

There are also smaller class sizes — "Some language classes have only seven or eight students, so it's fairly intensive" — as well as add-ons such as the "manhood" and "ideas for life" programs. "Public schools are great," Sloane says. "But private schools can give kids a critical edge."

'From kindie to year 12, we reckon we saved about $300,000.' Jane Caro, parent

Family discovers the world’s a classroom

There was no tuckshop or textbooks but, for the Bianchino family, a six-month trip to Europe was the best schooling money could buy. In 2005, Coffs Harbour mother Rowena Bianchino took her three children, Eduardo (then six), Raffaella (nine) and Giacomo (13), out of the local Steiner school and flew with them to France.

"When we landed we bought a second-hand BMW for €1000 and started driving," Bianchino says.

The family travelled light — the trip cost about $20,000 — staying in pensions or with friends and family. "I intended to home school and we got books and everything but there was just way too much other interesting stuff going on."

While Mum drove, Giacomo navigated. Wherever they went, the kids researched local myths and legends. They visited local barbers, went to mass with old women and met gypsies in Rome.

"Each day I gave the kids money to buy food at the local market and they'd do that in the local language," Bianchino says. "We would go to galleries, come home and they would practise drawing in the style of the artists they'd seen."

Children are like sponges when they travel, Bianchino says. "Everything is heightened, there is no stifling routine. Today Giacomo's great loves are philosophy, arts, religion, literature, all of which he owes to that trip. They all got a sense of the world being much bigger than the microcosm they'd lived in. They say the trip was the best thing they ever did."